The post Pulling Down the Bars: The 2018 #PrisonStrike appeared first on It's Going Down.

The 2018 Prison Strike has officially begun.

Already, the strike has spread into Canada, and numerous facilities around the US are already seeing hunger strikes pop off as prisoners issue demands. Prison officials are also cracking down on various facilities, shutting them down, and locking up prison rebel leaders as deep in the hole as they can.

This page will be updated throughout the strike with news of action and repression on both sides of the razor wire. For background information, strike demands, as well as a list of solidarity events, please go here.

Call-In Campaigns

Inside: Resistance and Repression During the Strike

  • Late June: Ronald Brooks, who made a pro-strike video at the Angola prison is transferred due to strike organizing organizing activity “to the David Wade Correctional Center, a notorious facility in North Louisiana that has faced more than 200 federal lawsuits from inmates since it opened in 1980. Brooks had been held at Angola since he was incarcerated at age 19; he turns 40 this year.”
  • Late July: Prison officials declare that Lucasville survivor Siddique Hasan, who has been placed on death row for his role in the 1993 uprising, has lost phone privileges for one year and cannot talk to the outside world about the 2018 prison strike. He launches a hunger strike in response. Prison officials even take to literally sand bagging Hasan’s cell, to keep messages and information from coming out. In Shadowproof, Ben Turk states:

“This seems like a really unique and different situation,” Ben Turk told Shadowproof. “In the past, like when [prison officials] made up the thing about bombing the prison, that was so obviously bullshit. They got what they really wanted, I think, which was to restrict his communications so he couldn’t speak during the strike, but that was not a permanent change in his situation. Now it seems like they’re trying to create a permanent change in his situation.”

  • Early August: Around 20 inmates at Sterling Correctional Faciliity in Colorado launch hunger strike and issue demands. According to the Denver Anarchist Black Cross:

THE 5 DEMANDS/POINTS OF HUNGER STRIKE

#1.) End of group punishments. Especially the “off the record” policy known as “redtag” used at Sterling. This is in reference to Colorado’s prisons locking down entire groups for one person’s actions. And it is almost exclusively used to lockdown groups of Hispanic inmates, which can force anywhere between 20-100 Hispanic inmates to be held indefinitely in solitary (for no action of their own) for months at a time. At any given moment.

#2.) Abolish solitary confinement, but especially as a punishment to retaliate against inmates who refuse to attend/participate in intel/ICC interviews.

#3.) C.D.O.C must comply with all parts of the settlement reached in Decoteau v.Raemisch as well as adhere to the statements made by Rick Raemisch himself in a Oct. 2017 New York Times article and statements where he stated “solitary confinement and extended restrictive housing have been abolished in Colorado. No inmate will be held in RH [restrictive housing] longer than 15 days.”

#4.) Refund all inmates; money for outstanding subscription and GTL Linkunit accounts due to tablets being recalled.

#5.) Expand educational programs to include some correspondence courses and programs to help build and strengthen family unity between inmates and their families in the outside world.

…this is our final hope at some sort of relief. It is powerful to witness men deprive themselves of the basic nutrients needed for survival in order to fight oppression, especially when most of us are routinely labeled ‘most violent.

  • August 19th: Prisoners in Nova Scotia launch a protest in solidarity with the #PrisonStrike in the US, issue their own demands. From the Halifax Examiner:

We, the prisoners of Burnside, have united to fight for change. We are unified across the population in non-violent, peaceful protest.

We are calling for support from the outside in solidarity with us. We believe that it is only through collective action that change will be made.

We recognize that the staff in the jail are workers who are also facing injustice. We are asking for a more productive rehabilitative environment that supports the wellbeing of everyone in the system. These policy changes will also benefit the workers in the jail.

Our voices should be considered in the programming and policies for this jail. The changes we are demanding to our conditions are reasonable, and must happen to support our human rights.

The organizers of this protest assert that we are being warehoused as inmates, not treated as human beings. We have tried through other means including complaint, conversation, negotiation, petitions, and other official and non-official means to improve our conditions. We now call upon our supporters outside these walls to stand with us in protesting our treatment.

We join in this protest in solidarity with our brothers in prison in the United States who are calling for a prison strike from August 21st to September 9th. We support the demands of our comrades in the United States, and we join their call for justice.

August 20th: All 11 prison facilities across New Mexico are now on lock down.

Outside: A Thousand Fires Against the Plantation

Pulling Down the Bars: The 2018 #PrisonStrike SOURCE: itsgoingdown.com]]>

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